Their methods have been scoffed at and their claims to be in touch with an afterlife taken with more than a pinch of salt – but a five-year test has shown that mediums can indeed discover your deepest secrets.

Researchers at the Scottish Society for Psychical Research (SSPR) say mediums who took part in their tests beat odds of a million to one to correctly reveal information about volunteer test subjects.

Tricia Robertson, vice-president of the SSPR, a registered charity with around 250 members, said: “We were not trying to prove the existence of the afterlife or that personalities live on, but I think it is now important to recognise that mediumship can honestly gain information that ordinary people can’t.

“I would welcome more academic research into this because it is an area where activity is unexplained as yet.”

A total of 13 mediums took part in the SSPR study, carried out in Scotland and London. In each test the medium would sit in a different room from the participants and choose seat numbers they wanted to read from the audience. The audience, usually around 30 people, would enter a room out of sight of the medium and on their way in be given a random seat number. After the reading, adjudicators would distribute lists of what the mediums had seen and the audience had to tick which of the mediums’ statements applied to them.

The rules of chance would suggest an accuracy rating of 30%, but the mediums’ average was 70%, with some hitting 80% on some of the participants.

“The results were very surprising,” said Robertson. “I have no idea how mediums can gain this information but the results prove that able mediums can accurately read their subjects. Their chances of guessing this level of information about their subjects is a million to one, statistically.

“I am aware that critics will say the tests were somehow rigged. But, rest assured, we could not have been more scientific in the way this was carried out. If anyone claims it is fixed or rigged, we would sue.”

Robertson is due to present her findings, which have been peer reviewed and published in the Journal Of The Society For Psychical Research, at the International Paranormal Conference at Muncaster Castle, Cumbria, this weekend.

Glasgow’s famous “psychic barber” Gordon Smith was one of the mediums who took part in the study. He said: “The conditions were very strict – I had to arrive an hour before the participants and never got to see them. While, for me, it is not essential to be in the same room as the participants, the work is very credible because of those test conditions we were working under.”

Professor Richard Wiseman, a noted psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire who studies the paranormal, said he was unconvinced by the SSPR’s test results.

“It could be true, but testing mediums is notoriously difficult to do well and I’m not entirely convinced that a figure of 80% would be accurate,” he said.

Amateur societies like the SSPR are carrying out most of the research into the paranormal because university-funded academic study is very limited.

Leonid stadnik's phenomenal height has forced him to quit a job he loved and to stoop as he moves around his house.But Stadnik, who Guinness World Records says is the world's tallest human, says his condition has also taught him that there are many kindhearted strangers.Since his recognition by Ukrainian record keepers four years ago, and by Guinness last year, people from all over Ukraine and the world have sent him outsized clothing, provided his home with running water and recently presented him with a giant bicycle. And on Monday, he got a new car, courtesy of President Viktor Yushchenko."Thanks to good people I have shoes and clothes," said the 37-year-old former veterinarian, who still lives with his 66-year-old mother.In 2006, Stadnik was officially measured at 8 feet 5 inches tall, surpassing a 7-foot-9-inch Chinese man to claim the title of the world's tallest person.His growth spurt began at age 14 after a brain operation that apparently stimulated the overproduction of growth hormone. Doctors say he has been growing ever since.While his size is intimidating, Stadnik charms visitors with a broad grin and childlike laugh. He seems at times like a lonely boy trapped in a giant's body, even keeping stuffed toys on his pillow.Stadnik's stature has brought attention, but he struggles to lead a normal life.All the doorways in his one-story brick house are too short for him to pass through without stooping. His 440 pounds cause constant knee pain and often force him to use crutches.

Stadnik loves animals, but had to quit his job as a veterinarian at a cattle farm after suffering frostbite when he walked to work in his socks in winter. He could not afford custom made shoes for his 17-inch feet.But his fame has taught him not to despair.A German who said he was his distant relative asked Stadnik for a visit several years ago. On the trip, Stadnik got to sample frog legs in an elegant restaurant and saw a roller coaster at an amusement park — both for the first time.

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

During the past few years the worldwide press has seen a virtual explosion of headlines claiming that a condition called “REM intrusion” explains near-death experiences. The media’s excitement makes it sound like a final solution. However, the people who really know NDEs say, “Not so fast.”

REM intrusion is a condition that occurs when some characteristics of the common REM sleep state—such as rapid eye movement, low muscle tone, and dreaming—activate during wakefulness. Without question, there are marked similarities between REM intrusion and NDEs, just as there are similarities with other much-hyped earlier comparisons such as temporal lobe epilepsy, oxygen deprivation, and the effects of some drugs. However, once again, what the world’s media overlooked in presenting the REM findings are their marked differences.

* NDE research years ago firmly established clear distinctions between NDEs and hallucinations; NDErs who had also experienced REM intrusion were not asked to compare the two. * REM intrusion does not explain key NDE elements such as veridical perception, lasting aftereffects, and visual perception in the blind * REM intrusion experiencers immediately recognize that their visual and auditory experiences are not reality-based, whereas NDErs describe theirs as “realer than real.” * Although the published study concludes that a higher rate of REM intrusion predisposes a person to NDEs, the NDErs weren’t asked when the intrusions occurred; so, it is just as likely that they occur as a result of an NDE. Further, 40% of the NDErs said they had never had REM intrusions at all.

Consciousness remains a big problem for neuroscientists there are many of things that not as clear cut as some people assume. For example Experiments have shown that memory is not localized in any particular part of the brain. It seems to be stored everywhere - and nowhere. This is just the kind of thing we might expect if consciousness, including memory, is really a nonphysical phenomenon existing outside the nervous system. While other neuroscientists believe that long term memories are created by the hippocampus area of the brain now here if the problem that may not be so as thesequestions are still open.

Some of the yet unsolved problems of neuroscience include:

* Self awareness: What is the neuronal basis of subjective experience, wakefulness, alertness, arousal and attention? What is its function?

* Perception: How does the brain transfer sensory information into coherent, private percepts? What are the rules by which perception is organized? What are the features/objects that constitute our perceptual experience of internal and external events? How are the senses integrated? Is face perception special (e.g. innate)? What is the relationship between subjective experience and the physical world?

* Learning and Memory: Where do our memories get stored and how are they retrieved again? How can learning be improved? What is the difference between explicit and implicit memories? How plastic is the mature brain?

* Development: How and why did the brain evolve (the way it did)? What are the molecular determinants of individual brain development?

* Sleep: Why do we dream? What are the underlying brain mechanisms? What is its relation to anesthesia?

* Cognition and Decisions: How and where does the brain evaluate reward value and effort (cost) to modulate behavior? How does previous experience alter perception and behavior? What are the genetic and environmental contributions to brain function?

* Language: How is it implemented neurally? What is the basis of semantic meaning?

* Diseases: What are the neural bases (causes) of mental diseases like psychotic disorders (e.g. mania, schizophrenia), Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease or addiction? Is it possible to recover loss of sensory or motor function?

Of course all materialists believe that these problems will be solve by the production theory. However, the lack of progress on many of these items should bring that unstinting faith into some question. . .

Long ago, antimatter all but vanished from existence, allowing matter to predominate and form the stars and planets of the universe. Exactly why this happened has been a mystery, but a particle accelerator in Japan may have found a new clue, and one that does not seem to fit the standard model of particle physics.

Earlier particle experiments had already seen a slight preference for matter over antimatter. For example, particles called kaons are less apt to self-destruct than their antimatter counterparts, antikaons. This preference can even be explained theoretically within the standard model of particle physics, as a lopsidedness of the weak nuclear force (technically called CP violation).

But that is far too slight to account for the predominance of matter in the universe. With only the standard model effect at work, in the dense early universe there would have been almost as much antimatter as matter.

Most of the antimatter would have collided with matter particles, destroying both in a burst of radiation. The universe today would be filled with light and other electromagnetic radiation, plus just a scattering of protons and electrons far too sparse to have formed stars or solid stuff.

So some other process must have favoured matter. Now an international collaboration working at the KEK accelerator in Tsukuba, Japan, may have seen a sign of it.New physics

KEK collides electrons and their antiparticles, positrons, to create unstable heavy particles called B mesons. A detector called Belle then monitors how these B mesons break up.

What the team saw was a difference in the way various types of B mesons decay. Uncharged B mesons fell apart more often than their antiparticles, while charged B mesons fell apart less often than their antiparticles.

According to Belle spokesman Tom Browder of the University of Hawaii, that is a sign of new physics. "The standard-model expectation is that the asymmetries in the two decay modes should be the same. We find that they are different."

More evidence of a fundamental preference for matter comes from a European group, which analysed data from several experiments on a similar particle, the BS meson. Their research also shows a non-standard preference for matter.Connected effects?

Luca Silvestrini of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Rome, a member of the European group, thinks their results are more certain than those from Belle, which he says might be accounted for within the standard model.

But he adds that the results might support one another. "The most exciting possibility is that the two effects are connected," Silvestrini told New Scientist.

It is still unclear whether the odd behaviour of B mesons actually reveals an effect powerful enough to create a preponderance of matter in the universe.

"Making the connection from the low-energy world of quarks or neutrinos to the extremely high-energy scale of the early universe is very difficult," says Browder. "Since we cannot directly probe the extreme energies of the early universe, we take what we can get."Future tests

Cosmologist Peter Coles of the University of Cardiff in the UK is cautiously positive. "I don't think there is a compelling theoretical understanding of the new CP-violation results. They don't fit naturally within standard model physics and they may therefore point to a resolution of the issue. I don't think you could say that they solve this problem though."

As with so many of today's questions in particle physics, the Large Hadron Collider could soon provide a clearer answer.

Due to begin operation at CERN in Geneva within a few months, this giant particle accelerator includes a detector called LHC-b that is specifically designed to investigate B mesons and their matter-antimatter biases. "It is unlikely that the puzzle will be solved and a full picture emerge before the LHC starts taking data this year," says LHC-b team member Val Gibson of Cambridge University in the UK.

Monday, March 24, 2008

How? well first the new testament says that we are a soul we don't have a soul also there is nowhere in it where it says we have an immortal soul. It says that all people, die and lay in the ground until judgement day when then they will be risen from the ground. Evidence from near death experiences, out of body experiences and many other areas of evidence make this idea false.

Also mainstream science has the view that mind equals brain function so here christians and mainstream scientists agree that we cease to exist when we die. Is it true? or is there an alternative not just an alternative but one that fits the evidence that has been gathered for over 100 years yes there is it is from reliable evidence such as the cross correspondences, reincarnation evidence, the newspaper and book tests. This evidence points strongly to the view that we have an immortal soul but not just humans but all species are likely to transition over to the afterlife realms where conditions are much better.

I have talk a lot i know about the evidence for the survival hypothesis but i believe it needs to be stress that it has significant role in the foundation of all living things on this planet. The implications are enormous.

I like to leave this post with a quote from Professor Sir William Barett

"I am absolutely convinced of the fact that those who once lived on earth can and do communicate with us. It is hardly possible to convey to the inexperienced an adequate idea of the strength and cumulative force of the evidence." William Barrett

user posted image rMars appears to be covered in salt crystals from ancient dried-up lakes, new evidence suggests. A Nasa probe has found signs that the southern hemisphere is dusted with chloride mineral, perhaps "table salt". US scientists think the mineral formed when water evaporated from salty lakes or soil billions of years ago. The deposits, similar to salt-pans on Earth, are a good place to search for traces of past life preserved in salt, they report in the journal Science. The evidence comes from a camera on Mars Odyssey, which has been mapping the Red Planet since early 2002. The camera images Mars in the visible and infrared parts of the spectrum in order to work out the distribution of minerals on the surface. It found about 200 places with spectral "fingerprints" consistent with chloride salt deposits. All were in the middle to low latitudes of the ancient, heavily cratered terrain in the southern highlands. Team member Professor Philip Christensen, of the School of Earth and Planetary Exploration at Arizona State University, Tempe, said the most likely chloride mineral "would be good old table salt (sodium chloride)". He said many of the deposits lay in basins with channels leading into them, the kind of feature that is consistent with water flowing in over a long time. He told BBC News: "Two possible mechanisms would be the evaporation of a large body of water (like a salt lake on Earth), or capillary action in the soil that could draw salt-rich water toward the surface, where the water evaporates and the salt is left behind and accumulates.

"Either case is exciting because it implies a large amount of water near the surface." Warmer, wetter: The team - which also includes members from the University of Hawaii, University of Arizona and Stony Brook University - thinks the deposits formed about four billion years ago, when Mars was probably much warmer and wetter.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Interesting youtube video on apparitions by Loyd Auerbach discussing a couple of accounts of apparitions

For more than 25 years he has been investigating reported paranormal phenomena and parapsychology. In an interesting example of a documented apparition he talks about a woman associated with a restaurant who has appeared thousands of miles away at activities related to the restaurant.

here it is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTCDTILS0d0

Here's a comment from the video posted under the username NicNasty1981

NicNasty1981 (2 months ago)

Replyit worrys me the growing number of people that believe this shit! how can he say at 1:08 that everyone of these psychics are speaking the truth!? no psychic has ever proved what theyve done is true! every study ever done shows theyre no more accurate than cold reading(if you dont know what this is look for derren brown) in the 70's very few people believed in this stuff compared to now. i cant help thinking this is a step back for the human species.

Leo- No studies eh? how about cross correspondences, the proxy sittings, the book tests and the newspaper tests. He does not mention them because he has done no research.

The term skeptic gets thrown around a lot. Some people say they are open minded skeptics to psi and survival after death which is fine. But then you get people like James Randi who say i am open to the paranormal being real but there is not a shred of evidence. Closed Minded skeptics such as James Randi like to pick things apart and declare well even if there is evidence for the parnormal it doesn't matter because it's likely that it is not true.

Critics who assert negative claims, but who mistakenly call themselves "skeptics," often act as though they have no burden of proof placed on them at all, though such a stance would be appropriate only for the agnostic or true skeptic. A result of this is that many critics seem to feel it is only necessary to present a case for their counter-claims based upon plausibility rather than empirical evidence. Thus, if a subject in a psi experiment can be shown to have had an opportunity to cheat, many critics seem to assume not merely that he probably did cheat, but that he must have, regardless of what may be the complete absence of evidence that he did so cheat and sometimes even ignoring evidence of the subject's past reputation for honesty. Similarly, improper randomization procedures are sometimes assumed to be the cause of a subject's high psi scores even though all that has been established is the possibility of such an artifact having been the real cause. Of course, the evidential weight of the experiment is greatly reduced when we discover an opening in the design that would allow an artifact to confound the results. Discovering an opportunity for error should make such experiments less evidential and usually unconvincing. It usually disproves the claim that the experiment was "air tight" against error, but it does not disprove the anomaly claim.

This also applys to survival after death one skeptic asserted to former lawyer Victor Zammit in a conference that even if you could prove it to me Victor i still would not accept it.

I remember Dr. Steven Novella [Materialist] saying that the best thing for a believer is a skeptic now that sure is true not that does not apply to all SKEPTICS the ones that are closed Minded.

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Some 200 students of Sekolah Menengah Sains Dungun probably felt they were in a real live ghost story. They are convinced they saw ghosts flying around the school on Sunday -- in the classrooms, the dormitories and the assembly hall.With many of the girls at the co-educational boarding school in hysteria, classes for the 600 students of the school were cancelled for the rest of the day.

On Monday, the hysteria repeated itself so the school was closed, and remained so as of yesterday. Many of the students who live nearby have been taken home by their parents, but the out-of-state students had no choice but to remain in their dormitories.

School administrators and the state Education Department did not want to comment, but one of the parents, Mazlan Ariffin, said his daughter said she had seen ghosts flying around the classroom.

"My daughter kept telling me that she saw the figure of a woman wearing all white flying around her classroom before closing in on her. She said she felt a sudden chill just before the ghostly figure reached her, and she just screamed," he said.A student named Wati said the incident began just after the weekly school assembly on Sunday morning, when a Form Two girl started screaming uncontrollably, seemingly in fear of something.

"Then other students started to scream and they had to be taken back to their rooms. I felt sick to my stomach and my head hurt so much that I probably passed out. I don't remember much of what happened after that," she said.

Another parent, who did not want to be named, said the second day was no better as more students were affected and once again classes had to be cancelled.

"The school told me to come and pick up my daughter. At first she refused to leave and scolded me for no reason. It was only when we were a few kilometres away from the school that she managed to recite the "dua kalimah shahadat" verse and felt fine all of a sudden," she said.

There have been no classes for four days, but the school is making efforts to bring the situation back to normal.

An American woman who levitated, demonstrated paranormal psychic powers and spoke foreign languages unknown to her was clearly demon possessed, according to a board-certified psychiatrist and associate professor of clinical psychiatry at New York Medical College.

The unnamed woman, with a long history of involvement with Satanic groups, was observed by a team of priests, deacons, several lay assistants, psychiatrists, nuns, some of whom also had medical and psychiatric training, levitating six inches off the ground while objects flew off shelves in the same room, according to Dr. Richard E. Gallagher, who documented the case in the February issue of the New Oxford Review.

"Periodically, in our presence, Julia would go into a trance state of a recurring nature," writes Gallagher. "Mentally troubled individuals often 'dissociate,' but Julia's trances were accompanied by an unusual phenomenon: Out of her mouth would come various threats, taunts and scatological language, phrases like 'Leave her alone, you idiot,' 'She's ours,' 'Leave, you imbecile priest,' or just 'Leave.' The tone of this voice differed markedly from Julia's own, and it varied, sometimes sounding guttural and vaguely masculine, at other points high pitched. Most of her comments during these 'trances,' or at the subsequent exorcisms, displayed a marked contempt for anything religious or sacred."

The subject would have no recollection of speaking these phrases upon recovering from the trance-like state, according to Gallagher.

"Sometimes objects around her would fly off the shelves, the rare phenomenon of psychokinesis known to parapsychologists," reports Gallagher. "Julia was also in possession of knowledge of facts and occurrences beyond any possibility of their natural acquisition.

"She commonly reported information about the relatives, household composition, family deaths and illnesses, etc., of members of our team, without ever having observed or been informed about them," he said. "As an example, she knew the personality and precise manner of death (i.e., the exact type of cancer) of a relative of a team member that no one could conceivably have guessed. She once spoke about the strange behavior of some inexplicably frenzied animals beyond her direct observation: Though residing in another city, she commented, 'So those cats really went berserk last night, didn't they?' the morning after two cats in a team member's house uncharacteristically had violently attacked each other at about 2 a.m."

Julia requested a Roman Catholic exorcism ritual, convinced from the beginning of her consultations that she was under demonic attack.

"The exorcism began on a warm day in June," Gallagher recollects. "Despite the weather, the room where the rite was being conducted grew distinctly cold. Later, however, as the entity in Julia began to spout vitriol and make strange noises, members of the team felt themselves profusely sweating due to a stifling emanation of heat. The participants all said they found the heat unbearable.

"Julia at first had gone into a quiet trance-like state. After the prayers and invocations of the Roman Ritual had been going on for a while, however, multiple voices and sounds came out of her. One set consisted of loud growls and animal-like noises, which seemed to the group impossible for any human to mimic. At one point, the voices spoke in foreign languages, including recognizable Latin and Spanish. (Julia herself only speaks English, as she later verified to us.)

"The voices were noticeably attacking in nature, and often insolent, blasphemous and highly scatological. They cursed and insulted the participants in the crudest way. They were frequently threatening – trying, it appeared, to fight back – 'Leave her alone,' 'Stop, you whores' (to the nuns), 'You'll be sorry,' and the like.

"Julia also exhibited enormous strength. Despite the religious sisters and three others holding her down with all their might, they struggled to restrain her. Remarkably, for about 30 minutes, she actually levitated about half a foot in the air."

The purpose of Gallagher's paper, he says, is to "document a contemporary and clear-cut case of demonic possession." He explains that even those who doubt such a phenomenon exists may find this case "rather persuasive."

"Possession is only one and not the most common type of demonic attack. Possession is very rare, though not as exceedingly so as many imagine," he concludes. "So-called 'oppression,' or 'infestation,' is less rare, though hardly frequent either, and sometimes more difficult to discern accurately."

Friday, March 14, 2008

1. Heaven by warrant2. Heaven by bryan adams3. i'll be missing you by faith evans and puff daddy4. one sweet day by mariah carey and boy 2 men5. immortality by celine dion and the bee gees6. down in heaven by kalan porter 7. ordinary miracle by sarah mclachlan8. god only cries by diamond rio 9. the riddle[ you and i] by five for fighting10. ever the same by rob thomas11. the black parade by my chemical romance12. i'll see you on the otherside by ozzy osbourne13. calling all angels by train14. hurt by christina aquilera15. dreams by van halen

Sometime around July 1937, Hamlin Garland, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and long-time psychical researcher, began investigating Sophia Williams, an amateur medium living in California. .

Williams was a “direct-voice” medium, but, unlike most direct-voice mediums, she did not require darkness and did not go into a trance. She would place the larger end of a megaphone against her breast while Garland would listen for voices at the smaller end and relay them to a stenographer. In most direct-voice mediumship, the cone or megaphone floats around the room while held by invisible hands as voices emanate from it. In his early years as a psychical research, Garland suspected direct-voice mediums were nothing more than talented ventriloquists, but he soon came to realize that not all of them were charlatans.

In his very first “sitting” with Williams, Garland was greeted by one of his oldest friends, Henry B. Fuller, who had helped him research cases of mediumship when he was alive. Always on the lookout for fraud, Garland wondered if Williams had read of Fuller in his book, Forty Years of Psychic Research. . A few minutes later, another voice was heard. The spirit identified himself as Lorado, his wife’s brother, who had died the prior year.

Garland noted that Fuller called him by his last name, while Lorado addressed him by his first name, exactly as they had done when they were alive. He further noted that the voices, which were high in vibration, sometimes seemed to be coming from the megaphone and at other times from the air above the medium’s head.

The most convincing evidence came when a voice addressed the stenographer, Gaylord Beaman. “Gay, this is Harry,” the voice was heard. When asked for a last name, “Friedlander” was given. The astonished Beaman explained to Garland that Harry Friedlander was a friend who died in a plane crash in San Francisco Bay. The spirit then gave some details concerning the crash. Garland was certain that Williams knew nothing of Beaman and could not have researched this information beforehand.

After the first few sittings with Williams, Garland devised a transmitting box with 60 feet of wire connecting with another box containing a receiver and amplifier. The purpose was to isolate Williams from his questions to the spirit communicators and thereby completely rule out mental telepathy. With Williams two rooms away and behind closed doors in Garland’s home, Williams could neither hear Garland’s questions nor see what he was pointing to or looking at, and since the spirits answered him with detailed information, Garland concluded that this was further evidence that Williams was not drawing the information from his or the stenographer’s mind.

When Garland’s “Uncle David,” who had been dead for some 30 years, communicated, Garland asked him if he remembered the old tune he used to play for him in on his fiddle. Through the amplifier, Garland then heard the tune When you and I were young, Maggie being whistled and played on a fiddle. It was not the tune Garland had in mind, so Garland ruled out the possibility that his subconscious mind was communicating with Williams’ subconscious. Moreover, if Williams were a fraud, she would have had to know about Uncle David, anticipate Garland’s question to him about the tune, and smuggle a fiddle into and out of Garland’s home.

Other spirits totally unrelated to Garland’s search continued to speak at times. One identified herself as Leila McKee, an old Wisconsin acquaintance. Another Wisconsin acquaintance, Wendell McIldowney, also came through. While Garland had by this time concluded that Williams was not a charlatan, he knew he had to be ready for claims by skeptics that Williams had done some research before meeting him. It would have been virtually impossible, he concluded, for any researcher to turn up either of these names from his past

Skeptics say that the visions of the dying are nothing more than hallucinations. However, it is very difficult to so discount certain cases. Consider the case of “Jennie,” and “Bessie” (both pseudonyms for privacy purposes) as related by Dr. Minot J. Savage, a popular Unitarian clergyman and author, in his 1899 book, Life Beyond Death.

Jennie and Bessie, ages 8-9, were close friends in a city in Massachusetts, and both afflicted with diphtheria. Jennie died on Wednesday, but Bessie was not informed of her friend’s death, as her family felt it might stand in the way of her recovery.

On Saturday, Bessie apparently realized that she was going to die and began telling her parents which of her brothers, sisters, and playmates should receive her treasured belongings. “Among these she pointed out certain things of which she was very fond, that were to go to Jennie -- thus settling all question as to whether or no she had found out that Jennie was not still living,” Savage wrote.

A little later, as she approached death, she began seeing deceased grandparents and others gathered around her bed. “And then she turned to her father, with face and voice both expressing the greatest surprise, and exclaimed, ‘Why, Papa, why didn’t you tell me that Jennie had gone? Why didn’t you tell me of it?’” Savage ends the story, commenting that this and similar stories suggest that more than hallucination and imagination are involved.

Savage also relates the case of a small boy who had befriended a judge of some prominence living in the neighborhood. After the boy was put to bed one night, his parents heard him crying. They rushed to him and asked him what was wrong. “Judge says he’s dead! He has been here and told me that he is dead!” the boy sobbed. The next morning the parents found out that the judge had died at about that time the night before.

After conducting a number of book tests, it was suggested to the Rev. Charles Drayton Thomas, a member of the London-based Society for Psychical Research, that he experiment in a different way – what Thomas came to call the “newspaper tests.” The suggestion was made by Thomas’ father, the Rev. John Thomas, like his son a Wesleyan minister when he was alive.

The newspaper tests, which also involved the medium Gladys Osborne Leonard, began in 1919, some two years after the book tests. In the newspaper tests, the discarnate Thomas, who had died in 1903, would provide information to be found in newspapers and magazines not yet printed. Thus, he would exercise a sort of precognition and clairvoyance. This would seemingly rule out what was being called Super ESP, the ability of the medium to go beyond reading the mind of the sitter and tap into the mind of anyone having a particular knowledge of a subject.

In a test on January 16, 1920, the junior Thomas was told to examine the Daily Telegraph for the following day and to notice that near the top of the second column of the first page the name of the place he was born. Thomas was born in Victoria Terrace on Victoria Street in Tuanton. When Thomas checked the paper the following day, he found the word “Victoria” exactly where his father said it would be.

In a test on February 13, 1920, Thomas was told to go to the London Times of the following day and near the top of column two of the first page he would find the name of a minister with whom he (the father) had been friendly when living in Leek. Lower in the column, he would find his (Drayton’s) name, his mother’s name, and an aunt’s name, all within a space of two inches. When the paper appeared the morning after the sitting, Thomas saw no familiar names relative to the minister friend. He then consulted with his mother who immediately called his attention to the name “Perks,” informing her son that the Rev. George T. Perks was a friend of his father’s and had visited him while they were living in Leek. Looking lower in the column, Thomas found his name, a slight variation of his mother’s name, and an aunt’s name, all within a space of 1 ¼ by 1 ½ inches.

In the same test, Thomas was told that two-thirds of the way down column one, he would find a word suggesting ammunition, and between that and the name of a former teacher of his he would find a French place name, looking like three words hyphenated into one. While Thomas found the name of a former teacher, “Watts,” it was in the column next to the one indicated by his father. As for the ammunition reference, the word “canon” appeared twice, apparently taken by the discarnate Thomas as “cannon.” The Belgian town of Braine-le-Château was also found in the column indicated.

Drayton Thomas checked with the London Times and concluded that the page from which his father took the information had not yet been typeset at the time the information was given to him through Leonard and Feda.

Many other newspaper tests were carried out by Drayton Thomas. In each case, he would immediately write down the information and file it in a sealed envelope with the Society for Psychical Research at a time before the type was set at the newspaper office. Further, Thomas would check papers from at least 10 other days, being sure that the same names did not appear in those editions, thereby ruling out coincidence. Some of the tests were inconclusive and a few were failures, but there were many more positive results.

The book tests conducted by the Rev. Charles Drayton Thomas, a member of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), are considered some of the very best evidence for spirit communication. “The primary purpose of these efforts was said [by my father] to be a demonstration that spirit people were able to do that for which telepathy from human minds could not account, a demonstration calculated to clarify the evidence already existing for the authorship of their communication,” Thomas wrote in 1922.

A Wesleyan minister, Thomas was especially interested in the popular theory that the medium was reading the mind of the sitter in providing information. He said that it was his father, the Rev. John Thomas, also a Wesleyan minister, who, posthumously, gave him the idea of the book and newspaper tests. It was during a sitting with Gladys Osborne Leonard, the renowned British medium, early in 1917, that the father and son on different sides of the veil began collaborating in the experiments.

The senior Thomas, who died in 1903, told his son that the tests had been devised by others in a more advanced sphere than his and the idea passed on to him. At the time, Drayton Thomas (he went by his middle name) had had over 100 sittings with Mrs. Leonard, although later in his career that number exceeded 500. He mentions that the tests were secondary to other business which he and his father discussed and that his father continually gave other evidence of his own identity.

Drayton Thomas would arrange a notebook on a table with a lighted lamp. Leonard would take a seat several feet from him and after two or three minutes of silence she would go into a trance. Suddenly, in a clear and distinct voice, Feda, Leonard’s spirit control, would take over Leonard’s body and begin using her speech mechanism while relaying messages from the senior Thomas and others in the spirit world. There was no similarity between Leonard’s voice and that of Feda, who spoke like a young girl. Moreover, Feda spoke with an accent and had frequent lapses of grammar.

Occasionally, just after Leonard went into the trance state, Thomas would hear whispering of which he could catch fragments, such as, “Yes, Mr. John, Feda will tell him…Yes, all right…” Feda often referred to herself in the third person, e.g., “Feda says she is having trouble understanding Mr. John.”

The idea behind the book tests was to communicate information gleaned by the father from a book in the son’s extensive library. For example, in one of the earliest experiments, the father told the son to go to the lowest shelf and take the sixth book from the left. On page 149, three-quarters down, he would find a word conveying the meaning of falling back or stumbling. When the younger Thomas arrived home that evening after his sitting with Mrs. Leonard, he went to the book and place on the page, where he found the words, “…to whom a crucified Messiah was an insuperable stumbling-block.”

The father explained to the son, through Feda, that he was able to get the “appropriate spirit of the passage” much easier than he could the actual words. However, over a period of 18 months experimentation, he found himself able to pick up more and more words and numbers, gradually shifting from “sensing” to “clairvoyance.” It was made abundantly clear by the father that he was experimenting on his side as much as his son was on the material side.

It was certain that Mrs. Leonard had never visited Thomas’ house and knew nothing of the library of books in it. Realizing, however, that his subconscious might somehow have recorded such detailed information in the book when he read it years before as well as the exact location of the book in his library, Thomas decided to experiment with books in a friend’s house. He informed his father of the plan so that the father knew where to search. In one of the tests there, Feda told Thomas that on page 2 of the second book from the right on a particular shelf, he would find a reference to sea or ocean. She added that the discarnate Thomas was not sure which, because he got the idea and not the words. When Drayton Thomas pulled the book from the shelf of his friend’s house, he read, “A first-rate seaman, grown old between sky and ocean.”

In another experiment, Drayton Thomas was told to look at page 9 where he would find a reference to changing of colors. Upon opening this book, Thomas found, “Along the northern horizon the sky suddenly changes from light blue to a dark lead colour.” In still another test at his home, Feda told Drayton Thomas to go to a book at a certain point on a shelf and he would find words looking like “A-sh-ill-ee” on the cover. Feda explained that she was giving the sound but not the correct spelling. When Thomas arrived home, he went to the exact spot indicated by Feda and found a book authored by Mrs. Ashley Carus-Wilson.

Put the name Viktor Korchnoi into an Internet Google search and you’ll get over 58,000 “hits.” The major biographies identify him as a four-time chess champion of the Soviet Union, a five-time winner of the European Championship, and a six-time member of Soviet teams that won the Chess Olympian. In September 2006, Korchnoi, known as “Viktor The Terrible,” became the World Senior Chess Champion. He has been active in chess for more than 50 years.

You’ll have to really search, however, to find mention of Korchnoi’s most interesting and intriguing victory, a match that started in 1985 and took 7 years and 8 months to complete. His opponent was another Chess Grandmaster, a Hungarian named Geza Maróczy. What made this match between the two grandmasters especially interesting and intriguing is the fact that Maróczy had died in 1951, 34 years before the match began.

At his website, researcher and author Miles Edward Allen ranks the case as number one of “The Survival Top 40.” That is, he feels it is the most evidential case of spirit communication on record. Allen draws from the April 2006 issue of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research article about the match. His account can be found at his website, listed at the end of this article. To summarize, however, Wolfang Eisenbeiss, Ph.D. got the idea from an acquaintance. Eisenbeiss arranged for a medium, Robert Rollans, to facilitate the competition. Rollans knew nothing about chess and was known to Eisenbeiss as a trustworthy individual.

Dr. Eisenbeiss, an amateur chess enthusiast, set out to find a Grandmaster here on the earth plane willing to compete with a Grandmaster in the spirit world. Even though he risked ridicule, Korchnoi accepted the challenge. Then, Eisenbeiss asked Rollans’ spirit control to find a Grandmaster in the spirit world who might be willing to compete against a Grandmaster here on the earth plane. After searching, Rollans’ spirit control reported back, through automatic writing, that Maróczy had accepted the challenge on that side of the veil.

Because Korchnoi was frequently traveling and competing, the game was drawn out for those seven-plus years. Maróczy, who played in an “old fashioned” style, resigned after 47 moves. Rollans died three weeks after the completion of the game.

Because of the time element, skeptics might easily question aspects of the game itself. It is Eisenbeiss’ questioning of Maróczy about his personal life and tournaments that provides the most evidence of spirit communication.

Using Rollans’ hand, Maróczy wrote 38 pages of biographical information in response to Eisenbeiss’ questions. Eisenbeiss then obtained the services of Laszlo Sebestyén, a historian and chess expert, to find out if the information could be verified. Out of 92 statements made by Maróczy, Sebestyén, who dug into library records and interviewed two of Maróczy’s surviving children and a cousin, was able to confirm 85 of them as factual. The remaining seven may have been factual, but no records could be found to confirm them.

One particularly evidential exchange between Eisenbeiss and Maróczy (through Rollans, of course) had to do with a match Maróczy had in 1930. Eisenbeiss, who had found a record of the match, asked Maróczy about the player he had defeated, an Italian named Romi. Maróczy replied that he never knew anyone by that name, but that he did defeat a man named “Romih.” Even though the historical records showed the name as “Romi,” Eisenbeiss found a program of the 1930 match in which the name was spelled “Romih.”

Often materialist's use ockham's razor against dualism by saying that dualism provokes multiple entities no it doesn't it says that there is more to reality that there is a non physical reality too. It's funny how materialist's and use it but don't use it at all when comforting there own way around the fine tuned universe agrument. They claim that there are billions and billions of parellel universes.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Dr. Steven Novella says: if the brain causes the mind then: there will be no documented mental function in the absence of brain function; altering the brain biologically will alter the mind functionally; mental development will correlate with brain development; and mental activity will correlate with brain activity (this holds up no matter what method we use to look at brain activity - EEG to look at electrical activity, PET scanning to look at metabolic activity, SPECT scanning to look at blood flow, and functional MRI to look at metabolic and neuronal activity).

This evidence cannot be dismissed as the “easy problem” nor as mere correlation. Brain function correlates with the mind in every way we would predict from the hypothesis that the brain causes the mind. From a scientific point of view, the mind is a manifestation of the brain.

Leo- Here he says it cannot be dismisses as mere correlation but he says brain function correlates with the mind but there is another testable hypothesis that the brain filters consciousness or is the transmitter/receiver of consciousness.

As I have discussed previously, one way to dodge the obvious conclusion from this evidence is to confuse the question of how the brain causes the mind with the question of does the brain cause the mind. We certainly have much to learn about exactly how the brain functions to produce all mental phenomena, but this in no way diminishes the fact that the question of whether or not the brain causes the mind is settled - it does.

Leo- settled? the transmission and the production theory he cites makes pretty well the same predictions.

Here's how

The testability is related to spontaneous cases in which there is consciousness and memory while the brain could not be the source of either, such as paranormal NDEs and reincarnation type cases in young children

Dr. Egnor in his rebuttal is referring to another common fallacy used to dismiss the undeniable evidence linking brain function to mental function - retreating to philosophy, or more specifically to a conceptual realm that is not empirical and which defies common language. It is true that we lack the vocabulary necessary to define exactly what consciousness is. Egnor speaks of it as if the mind is a separate and definable thing, for example when he writes:

How can mind ‘substance’ interact with matter ‘substance’ without violating conservation laws in physics?

There is no reason to think of the mind as having “substance”, and you notice the quotations as tacit admission that this word is not adequate or accurate, but his choice is none-the-less very deliberate and meant to imply that mind has a separate existence. Yet there is no evidence to support this hypothesis.

First of all, natural laws as we define them are based on our interpretation of empirical testing and observation. Therefore, they are subject to constant change as new discoveries are found which challenge or contradict our models. Throughout history, we have constantly updated and expanded our understanding of the laws of how the universe works. In the past, it was said that things like heavier than air flight and going to the moon were impossibilities. Skeptics of those things were proven wrong of course. At one time, according to the law of aerodynamics, a hummingbird shouldn’t be able to hover, yet it did, so we had to figure out why and revise our laws of aerodynamics. When Albert Einstein discovered that light travels at a constant speed (e.g. if you’re traveling in a car and shine a flashlight forward, the car’s speed is not added to the light’s speed), and formulated his theory of relativity (time slows down as you go faster), and postulated that gravity involves distortion of space, all these things contradicted the Newtonian laws of physics at the time, yet they were eventually validated. As of now, special relativity and quantum mechanics are at odds with each other, and physicists are seeking a grand unified theory to unite them both. As history has shown, we constantly update and expand our laws of physics to fit the data, not deny the data and new discoveries just to protect our beliefs.

In fact, new discoveries in quantum physics each year are shattering the materialistic reductionist view we had of the universe, making psychic phenomena and other dimensions more plausible. These include the non-locality (meaning distance and space don’t exist) of twin particles (discovered by Alan Aspect in 1982), string theories that postulate several other dimensions beside our own, the discovery that particles behave differently when observed (making psychokinesis more probable), etc. (See Fred Alan Wolfe’s Taking the Quantum Leap and The Spiritual Universe) Each new discovery seems proves the skeptics wrong and moves us further from their views and closer to metaphysical paradigms. This is obviously not a good sign for their case. It appears that the skeptic camp is a sinking ship that one should get off to avoid embarrassment. Just the discovery alone in quantum physics that all matter is a form of vibrating energy makes paranormal and psychic phenomena much more plausible and understandable.

Materialist neuroscientists also struggle to define what the mind is in satisfying prose. Some describe the mind simply as what the brain does, or as a epiphenomenon that emerges from the collective functioning of the brain (I prefer this latter description). Still others speak of our subjective sense of consciousness as nothing more than an illusion, but I think this description, while it has merit, is more confusing than illuminating.

True because there is so much still to understand

The biggest problem with dualism is that the materialist neuroscience model explains all observed phenomena - there is nothing left for the dualists to explain. They are clinging to the notion of “qualia”, that subjectivity itself needs a separate explanation, but they have not made this case. Often they use mere semantics to make it seem as if something more is needed, but there isn’t. Further, the dualist hypothesis does not generate any hypotheses or predictions that distinguish it from the materialist hypothesis. Every prediction points to materialism as the answer.

Leo- Wrong there is overwhelming evidence from Psi, Survival of bodily death, stigmata, internal impressions etc as perfectly demonstrated in the irreducible mind book

The dualist hypothesis, which supporters put forward to fill the apparent gap of how the brain causes mind, only succeeds in replacing a non-mystery with an actual mystery. Namely, if the mind is something separate from the brain why is the correlation so strong? Why is it that any and every aspect of the mind can be altered, even eliminated, by modifying the biology, physiology, or anatomy of the brain?

Leo- The transmission theory does not ignore the strong correlation the wustion at hand is the brain producing consciousness or constraining it.

Some dualists, like B. Alan Wallace, have “solved” the problem by saying that the brain creates the mind, but that the mind, once created, is something more than the brain. The problem with this is that it is non-falsifiable, and neither Wallace nor anyone else has figured out how to test this notion. Wallace has argued, post-hoc, that the brief delay (100ms) that occurs from the moment a neuronal network fires to the report of the subject experience of it firing is evidence for the mind being separated from the brain, but this is nonsense. The delay of 100ms is simply how long it takes for nerves to conduct signals and for the brain activity to work its way to conscious awareness.

I think it is no coincidence that dualists and creationists have found common ground. Both commit these same logical errors. Intelligent design is an attempt to render evolution denial non-falsifiable, just as dualism has retreated from modern neuroscience until it has also become non-falsifiable. Both have rendered themselves not even wrong.

Le0- Intelligent design does not deny evolution it's true that there are creationists who hijack the idea of intelligent design and use the bible as proof. intelligent design says that looking at the fine tuning argument and the the intelligence in the universe that it could have not evolved by natural selection alone.

Monday, March 10, 2008

Another interesting article written by Dr Danny Penman:" Dr Nelson's Global Consciousness Project - originally hosted by Princeton University - is one of the most extraordinary experiments of all time. It aims to ‘sense' whether all of humanity shares a single unconscious mind that we all tap into without realizing it.

The project threw up its greatest enigma on September 11th 2001. As the world stood still and watched the horror of the terrorist attacks unfold across New York, something strange was happening to the random number generators. Not only did they register the event as it happened, but the characteristic shift in the pattern of numbers began four hours before the two planes hit the Twin Towers. "I knew then that we had a great deal of work ahead of us," says Dr Nelson. The same happened with the Asian Tsunami. Twenty four hours before the tragedy unfolded, the characteristic shift in the pattern of numbers began. Curiously, it was at around this time that animals in the path of the tsunami began fleeing for their lives.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published a piece on philosopher and PA member Stephen E. Braude. The Chronicle charges a small fee for reading the article, but Jacob at Mind-Energy.net provides a nice summary and a link where the article can be accessed for free for a limited time.

I have always been a big fan of ghosbusters especially the first one that came out I remember when i was younger and the days when i was sick with the flu my mom used to pop in the movie on vhs ghostbusters.

Here's is another interesting blog site called Paranormalia which talks about controversial issues such as parapsychology.

Check it out herehttp://www.paranormalia.com/

The blog description reads:

Parapsychologists think some paranormal claims are genuine. Sceptics say they can all be explained in terms of fraud or misperception. Paranormalia takes the view that parapsychologists are right, but recognises that the issues are hard to penetrate. It comments on recent controversies, research and books to help shed light on this fascinating and much misunderstood subject

Here's an interesting with Wallace on his journey into spiritualism he was alos the co founder of darwin theory of natural selection.

Dr. Wallace, what were your early views relative to spiritual matters?

"Up to the time when I first became acquainted with the facts of Spiritualism, I was a confirmed philosophical skeptic, rejoicing in the works of Voltaire, Strauss, and Carl Vogt, and an ardent admirer (as I still am) of Herbert Spencer. I was so thorough and confirmed a materialist that I could not at that time find a place in my mind for the conception of spiritual existence, or for any other agencies in the universe than matter and force."

So what changed your mind?

"My curiosity was at first excited by some slight but inexplicable phenomena occurring in a friend's family, and my desire for knowledge and love of truth forced me to continue the inquiry. The facts became more and more assured, more and more varied, more and more removed from anything that modern science taught or modern philosophy speculated on. The facts beat me. They compelled me to accept them as facts long before I could accept the spiritual explanation of them; there was at that time no place in my fabric of thought into which it could be fitted. By slow degrees a place was made; but it was made, not by any preconceived or theoretical opinions, but by the continuous action of fact after fact, which could not be got rid of in any other way."

Would you mind elaborating on that occurrence with the friend's family?

"It was in the summer of 1865 that I first witnessed any of the phenomena of what is called Spiritualism, in the house of a friend - a skeptic, a man of science, and a lawyer, with none but members of his own family present. Sitting at a good-sized round table, with our hands placed upon it, after a short time slight movements would commence, and not often ‘turnings' or tiltings,' but a gentle intermittent movement like steps, which after a time would bring the table quite across the room. Slight but distinct tapping sounds were also heard. They gradually increased; the taps became very distinct, and the table moved considerably, obliging us all to shift our chairs."

What did you make of that?

"That there is an unknown power developed from the bodies of a number of persons placed in connection by sitting around a table with all their hands upon it. And the fact that we often sat half an hour in one position without a single sound, and that the phenomena never progressed further than I have related, weighs I think very strongly against the supposition that a family of four highly intelligent and well-educated persons should occupy themselves for so many weary hours in carrying out what would be so poor and unmeaning a deception."

Did you witness other phenomena after that?

"In September 1865, I began a series of visits to Mrs. Marshall (a London medium), generally accompanied by a friend - a good chemist and mechanic, and of a thoroughly skeptical mind. What we witnessed may be divided into two classes of phenomena - physical and mental. Both were very numerous and varied."

I gather from your various writings that you gradually came to accept the spirit hypothesis? Would you mind explaining that?

"Perhaps the most important characteristic of these phenomena [is that] they are from beginning to end essentially human. They come to us with human ideas; they make use of human speech, of writing and drawing; they manifest wit and logic, humor, and pathos, that we can all appreciate and enjoy; the communications vary in character as those of human beings; some rank with the lowest, some with the highest, but all are essentially human. When the spirits speak audibly, the voice is a human voice; when they appear visible, the hands and the faces are absolutely human; when we can touch the forms and examine them closely we find them human in character, not those of any other kind of being. The photographs are always the photographs of our fellow creatures; never those of demons or angels and animals. When hands, feet or faces are produced in paraffin moulds they are all in minutest details those of men and women, though not those of the medium. All of these various phenomena are of this human character.

"The spiritual theory is the logical outcome of the whole of the facts. Those who deny it, in every instance with which I am acquainted, either from ignorance or disbelief, leave half the facts out of view. That theory is most scientific which best explains the whole series of phenomena; and I therefore claim that the spirit hypothesis is the most scientific, since even those who oppose it most strenuously often admit that it does explain all the facts, which cannot be said of any other hypothesis."

What about the theory holding that medium has a secondary personality which is somehow giving rise to all the phenomena?

"But is this so-called explanation any real explanation, or anything more than a juggle of words which creates more difficulties than it solves? The conception of such a double personality in each of us, a second-self, which in most cases remains unknown to us all our lives, which is said to live an independent mental life, to have means of acquiring knowledge our normal self does not possess, to exhibit all the characteristics of a distinct individuality with a different character from our own, is surely a conception more ponderously difficult, more truly supernatural than that of a spirit world, composed of beings who have lived, and learned, and suffered on earth, and whose mental nature still subsists after its separation from the earthly body. On the second-self theory, we have to suppose that this recondite but worser half of ourselves, while possessing some knowledge we have not, does not know that it is part of us, or, if it knows, is a persistent liar, for in most cases it adopts a distinct name, and persists in speaking of us, its better half, in the third person.

"There is yet another and I think a more fundamental objection to this view, in the impossibility of conceiving how or why this second-self was developed in us under the law of survival of the fittest.

"This cumbrous and unintelligible hypothesis finds great favor with those who have always been accustomed to regard the belief in a spirit-world, and more particularly a belief that the spirits of our dead friends can and do sometimes communicate with us, as unscientific, unphilosophical, and superstitious."

So you feel the spirit hypothesis is definitely a scientific one?

"Why it should be unscientific more than any other hypothesis which alone serves to explain intelligibly a great body of facts has never been explained. The antagonism which it excites seems to be mainly due to the fact that it is, and has long been in some form or other, the belief of the religious world and of the ignorant and superstitious of all ages, while a total disbelief in spiritual existence has been the distinctive badge of modern scientific skepticism."

Do you feel there is as much evidence for survival as there is for biological evolution?

"My position is that the phenomena of Spiritualism in their entirety do not require further confirmation. They are proved quite as well as facts are proved in other sciences."

The skeptics often point to the trivial nature of mediumistic messages. Do you have any thoughts on that?

"The trivial and fantastic nature of the acts of some of these disembodied spirits is not to be wondered at when we consider the myriads of trivial and fantastic human beings who are daily becoming spirits, and who retain, for a time at least, their human natures in their new condition. So if we realize to ourselves the fact that spirits can in most cases only communicate with us in certain very limited modes, we shall see that the true ‘triviality' consists in objecting to any mode of mental converse as being trivial or undignified."

Materialists often say that you believe what you do simply because there is a will or need to believe. Can you objectively say that is not the case with you?

"For 25 years I had been an utter skeptic as to the existence of any preter-human or super-human intelligence, and that I never for a moment contemplated the possibility that the marvels related by Spiritualism could literally be true. If I have now changed my opinion, it is simply by the force of evidence. It is from no dread of annihilation that I have gone into this subject; it is from no inordinate longing for eternal existence that I have come to believe in facts which render this highly probable, if they do not actually prove it. At least three times during my travels I have had to face death as imminent or probable within a few hours, and what I felt on those occasions was at most a gentle melancholy at the thought of quitting this wonderful and beautiful earth to enter on a sleep which might know no waking. In a state of ordinary health I did not feel even this. I knew that the great problem of conscious existence was one beyond man's grasp, and this fact alone gave some hope that existence might be independent of the organized body. I came to the inquiry, therefore, utterly unbiased by hopes or fears, because I knew that my belief could not affect the reality, and with an ingrained prejudice against even such a word as ‘spirit,' which I have hardly yet overcome."

What do you say to those members of orthodox religion who seem to be satisfied with faith alone and ask what the use of spirit communication is?

"It substitutes a definite, real, and practical conviction for a vague, theoretical, and unsatisfying faith. It furnishes actual knowledge on a matter of vital importance to all men and most advanced thinkers have held, and still hold, that no knowledge was attainable."

Thank you, Dr. Wallace. Any parting thoughts?

"If a man die shall he live again? This is the question which in all ages has troubled the souls of men; the prophets and the wise men of antiquity were in doubt as to the answer to be given it. Philosophy has always discussed it as one of the unsolved problems of humanity, while modern science instead of clearing up the difficulty and giving us renewed hope, either ignores the question altogether or advances powerful arguments against the affirmative reply. Yet the ultimate decision arrived at, whether in the negative or affirmative, is not only of vital interest to each of us individually, but is calculated, I believe, to determine the future welfare or misery of mankind.

"If the question should be finally decided in the negative, if all men without exception ever come to believe that there is no life beyond this life, if children were all brought up to believe that the only happiness they can ever enjoy will be upon earth, then it seems to me that the condition of man would be altogether hopeless, because there would cease to be any adequate motive for justice, for truth, for unselfishness, and no sufficient reason could be given to the poor man, to the bad man, or to the selfish man, why he should not seek his own personal welfare at the cost of others."

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Professor Ernst Senkowski sits hunched over a trailing mass of wires and ageing radios in his laboratory. To the untrained eye it looks like an impossible tangle, but the Professor says it’s a machine for communicating with the dead.

As the wind howls outside his lab, the physics professor tells me about the first message he received on his equipment: “A voice came through and said quite clearly ‘We are the dead. We are still able to think and speak.”

“I was a bit shaken,” he smiles.

But that was just the first of Professor Senkowski’s ‘messages from the dead’. Shortly afterwards he received a message from his father, who’d died many years previously.

“Ernst my little dwarf,”. The Professor recalls his father’s ghostly voice as saying. “He spoke in a little used Prussian dialect. And no one but my father used, or even knew, that nickname.”

“I was not a believer. I’m a physicist. But all of the evidence I’ve seen confirms that the dead are trying to communicate with us.”

Emeritus Professor Senkowski, a physicist from Bingen technical university in Germany, is one of a growing band of researchers studying messages that appear to come from the dead. The communications often take the form of ghostly voices picked up by radios and tape recorders, but very occasionally, television pictures mysteriously arrive unbidden. Researchers claim the communications, known as Electronic Voice Phenomena – or EVP - can be heard loud and clear. They also appear to answer questions posed by scientists and can predict the future.

More intriguingly, the ghostly voices often talk of a beautiful afterlife that is filled with happiness, where suffering is unknown, and loneliness long forgotten. Occasionally, the voices will describe a “hell” full of restless souls waiting to be reincarnated so they can re-learn life’s lessons.

Many of those who study the cryptic messages from the dead are not cranks or fraudsters eager to delude the gullible. Surprisingly, they also include respected researchers, diplomats, and academics. Around 20 different countries now host research groups dedicated to studying the mysterious phenomena. And now British researchers have gathered compelling evidence which, they believe, proves that the ghostly voices do indeed come from the dead.

So are we on the verge of communicating with the deceased? Professor David Fontana, a psychologist at Cardiff University, thinks we might be.

He says that the evidence for the ghostly voices originating with the dead is now “very compelling”.

“They are not the result of fraud or stray radio waves being picked up by the equipment,” says Professor Fontana.

“That leaves just two possibilities. The first is a psychokinetic effect, where the human mind somehow imprints a voice directly onto a piece of audio tape or a radio. The second possibility is that it comes from the deceased.

“It seems that EVP are most likely to be from the deceased.”

Electronic Voice Phenomena were first detected shortly after the invention of radio. Early radio engineers would often hear ghostly voices sweeping in and out of tune on their newly built receivers and recording equipment. Intriguigingly, the voices could only ever be heard on electronic recordings. The engineers would often design radios with perfect reception, and yet, when they tried to record broadcasts they would hear unexpected whispering voices in the background. Voices that were most definitely not present in the original broadcast.

As the technology advanced, most of this ‘interference’ was eliminated. But very occasionally, the voices would once again appear and disappear in the space of a few seconds. Try as they might, the engineers could never quite eliminate the whispering voices. After a while, such occasional ghosts in the machine were ignored by engineers and written off as ‘interference’.

But all that changed in the early 1950s when the Catholic church started taking an interest.

Strange as it may seem, the Vatican employs a large number of scientists to ensure that the Church is up to date with technological developments. They are often highly gifted and dedicated researchers who bring to science a refreshingly different perspective.

In 1952, two of these researchers stumbled across ghostly messages whilst recording some Gregorian chanting. As they played back the recording, Fathers Gemelli and Ernetti noticed a whispering voice in the background – one that was definitely not there in the original. After a while Gemelli realised that it was his father’s voice.

The priests then recorded the chanting once more - and again heard the voice. It said quite clearly: “But Zucchini, it is clear, don't you know it is I?”

Again it was Gemelli’s father’s voice, but more significantly, he used the nickname “Zucchini’, a name known only to the priest’s parents. Those few words convinced Gemelli that he was talking with his father. The priests took their findings to Pope Pius XII, with surprising results. Expecting to be chastised for communicating with the dead, the two priests were shocked to discover that the Pope was delighted with their research.

The Pope reassured them: “This experiment may perhaps become the cornerstone for building scientific studies which will strengthen people's faith in a hereafter.”

The scientific study of EVP took an even stranger turn in 1971 when sound engineers at Pye Records in London decided to investigate the phenomena. To help them, they brought in Konstantin Raudive, an expert on EVP.

Raudive was seated in a studio and asked to speak into a microphone. The studio and microphone were completely shielded from all radio waves and magnetic fields, thus eliminating all possible sources of interference and fraud. The engineers taped Raudive's voice for eighteen minutes, during which none of the experimenters heard any other sounds. But when the scientists played back the tape, they could hear over two hundred voices on it.

The Pye Records study did little to spark long term interest amongst researchers. Many of those who believed in the phenomena retired from the field, claiming that EVP was now a proven scientific fact. The sceptics simply cried foul and carried on ignoring it.

But here and there, in small research groups around the world, EVP devotees carried on their work. One, the American George Meek, even claimed to have built a machine - the 'spiricom' - which allegedly allowed two-way conversations with the dead. Meek’s machine initially impressed many, although after an encouraging start it mysteriously failed to produce further results.

The whole field was radically shaken up a few years ago when researchers in Spain and France started to receive a ‘spiritual radio station’. The dwindling band of EVP devotees were delighted. The communicators – who all claimed to be deceased – dubbed themselves ‘Timestream’. And rather than being a fleeting phenomena easily dismissed by sceptics, the researchers still receive Timestream on a weekly basis. It must rank as one of the most bizarre psychic claims of all time, and yet, it has a large number of eminent researchers backing it.

Dr Anabela Cardoso was the first to receive Timestream. She is not regarded as a crank. On the contrary, she is one of Portugal’s most senior diplomats, having held such posts as the Portuguese Consul in the US, Charge d’Affairs in Japan, and Consul General in France and Spain.

Many of the messages received by Dr Cardoso – and witnessed by Britain’s Professor Fontana – were picked up by surprisingly low-tech equipment. She uses five radios, all tuned to different blank channels, which consequently pick up only ‘white noise’. These white noise channels are recorded using an ordinary tape recorder. When these recordings are played back, the researchers claim you can hear the voices of spirits. And if you ask the spirits questions, then you receive answers.

Many are sceptical of the claims made for Timestream, but what if it truly was a ‘broadcast’ from the dead? A big ‘if’ admittedly. What could it tell us about the nature of life – and death?

The messages received by Dr Cardoso claim that “survival after death is a universal law”.

“I am told that everybody and everything survives death,” says Dr Cardoso. “All living beings, be they plants or animals, live on after they die.”

“Suffering is also very important for spiritual development,” says Dr Cardoso. “They say that we should live happy and contented lives, but that we should also realise that when suffering comes, it will help us in our growth and development. Real spiritual awareness consists of accepting what life brings us.”

The messages hint that the afterlife is similar to our world in some ways, except that it is far more beautiful and less constrained by physical laws. Spirits can move effortlessly and with infinite speed. They can be in two places at once. Time seems to have little, if any, meaning. Equality runs throughout their realm, with humans, plants, and animals all having the same spiritual value.

Professor David Fontana, of Cardiff University, has studied EVP for three years and worked alongside Dr Cardoso. He says that her results are genuine.

“There’s now a tremendous amount of evidence for EVP. Dr Cardoso’s work is very strong indeed. I’ve worked with her when she has received information from Timestream under conditions that rule out stray interference or fakery.

“If you ask questions, you get answers. It’s very, very compelling.”

In addition, the voices of Timestream have been analysed by the University of Vigo in Spain and by the respected Il Laboratorio in Italy. One of the voice analysis experts at Il Laboratorio also works for the Italian police and law courts. The computer-based voice analysis techniques he used were identical to those used by the FBI. All of these experts claim that the voices are not human.

But Professor Chris French of Goldsmiths College in London is still highly sceptical of the claims made by EVP researchers. He says: “I’ve no doubt that some examples of EVP are the result of receivers picking up stray radio waves and the rest is simply down to people reading too much into random noise.”

“It’s similar to the way some people manage to see the face of the Virgin Mary in a burnt piece of toast. Another example is the way some people claim they can hear Satanic messages when Led Zeppelin is played backwards. There are clearly no words in there but some people are still convinced they can hear them.”

But academics studying the phenomena are convinced that they can rule out fraud, radio interference and ‘over-interpreting’ the results. They want to move on and begin interrogating the dead to see if they will reveal more about the afterlife.

I had many ps2 games before but i sold them with the system now I got another ps2 system here are my games so far:

1. the Getaway Black Monday- Over the past two years, organized crime has decreased and the streets of London have grown quiet. But beneath it all, the criminal underworld has been rebuilding. A new crime boss will emerge and no one is prepared for what's about to hit the city.

2. Black- As a black operative, you'll obey the laws, know no borders, kill without mercy, ad live by the five rules of guncraft.

3. Cabela's Outdoor Adventure- Take the hunting and fishing expedition of a lifetime with 22 adventures across North America and beyond. Stalk monster bucks and trophy big game or stop off and fish the local waters.

4. Suzuki TT Superbikes- Have you got what it takes to be king of the mountain?

5. Racing Italiano- Do you have the vision, the heart and the focus to be the first to cross the finish line?

Sunday, March 2, 2008

There are three options we have that will be awaiting us before we die

Oblivion/Extinction Hypothesis - This is what all materialists assume also lots of mainstream scientists that when the brain dies consciousness ceases to exist. However that assumption is based on the production theory the case at hand is what type of functional dependancy of cerbral action there is. Is it productive or transmissive/permissive as Sir William James clearly points out in his article two supposed objections to the doctrine of immortality http://www.survivalafterdeath.org/articles/james/immortality.htm.

Super Psi Hypothesis- There is no evidence for this theory however there is lots of evidence for psi in the living however just because there is lots of evidence for psi does not mean we should expand it to try and cover the data for the survival hypothesis.

Survival Hypothesis- There is lots of evidence which has been dicussed many times on this blog.

Romanian cops have closed a vandalism investigation that left local houses in ruins by concluding ghosts were to blame.

Families living in Lilieci reported windows broken, bicycles flying through the air, objects moving on tables and candles blown out when there is no wind.

When they complained they were being hounded by evil spirits to police they were laughed at.

But after officers saw the evidence with their own eyes they filed a report saying that ghosts were to blame.

Mircea Hadimbu, 68, who says his house has now been completely wrecked, said: "The windows started to break one by one. I saw two bicycles moving through the air on their own."

His sister Melentina Bocancea, 78, who lives nearby, added: "There were cups flying around the house and candles I lit were blown out as soon as I put a match to them even though there was not a breath of wind in the house."

A police spokesman said: "There were bottles and things flying around. I did not know what to dodge first. We can find nothing to suggest it was anything other than what the people claim."

A priest has been called in to perform exorcisms of houses in the town in the hope that the attacks will finally stop.